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Updated: 10 min 46 sec ago

How AlmaLinux's Community Supported RHEL Binary Compatibility

Sat, 09/12/2023 - 9:34pm
Linux magazine interviewed an AlmaLinux official about what happened after their distro pivoted to binary compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux rather than being a downstream build: Linux Magazine: What prompted AlmaLinux to choose ABI over 1:1 compatibility with RHEL? benny Vasquez, chair of the AlmaLinux OS Foundation: The short answer is our users. Overwhelmingly, our users made it clear that they chose AlmaLinux for its ease of use, the security and stability that it provides, and the backing of a diverse group of sponsors. All of that together meant that we didn't need to lock ourselves into copying RHEL, and we could continue to provide what our users needed. Moreover, we needed to consider what our sponsors would be able to help us provide, and how we could best serve the downstream projects that now rely on AlmaLinux. The rippling effects of any decision that we make are beyond measure at this point, so we consider all aspects of our impact and then move forward with confidence and intention. LM: How did AlmaLinux's mission of improving the Linux ecosystem for everyone influence this decision? bV: We strongly believe that the soul of open source means working together, providing value where there is a gap, and helping each other solve problems. If we participate in an emotional reaction to a business's change, we will then be distracted and potentially hurt users and the Enterprise Linux ecosystem overall. By remaining focused on what is best (though not easiest), and adapting to the ecosystem as it is today, we will provide a better and more stable operating system. LM: What opportunities does the ABI route offer over 1:1 compatibility? bV: By liberating ourselves from the 1:1 promise, we have been able to do a few small things that have proven to be a good testing ground for what will come in the future. Specifically, we shipped a couple of smallish, but extremely important, security patches ahead of Red Hat, offering quicker security to the users of AlmaLinux... This also opens the door for other features and improvements that we could add back in or change, as our users need. We have already seen greater community involvement, especially around these ideas. LM: Does the ABI route pose any extra challenges? bV: The obvious one is that building from CentOS Stream sources takes more effort, but I think the more important challenge (and the one that will only be solved with consistency over time) is the one of proving that we will be able to deliver on the promise... We will continue on our goal of becoming the home for all users that need Enterprise Linux for free, but in the next year I expect that we will see an expansion in the number of kernels we support and see some new and exciting SIGs spun up around other features or use cases, as the community continues to standardize on how to achieve their goals collectively. Linux magazine notes that in August AlmaLinux added two new repositories, Testing and Synergy. "Testing, currently available for AlmaLinux 8 and 9, offers security updates before they are approved and implemented upstream. Synergy contains packages requested by community members that currently aren't available in RHEL or Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL, a set of extra software packages maintained by the Fedora SIG that are not available in RHEL or CentOS Stream)." The article also points out that "On the upside, AlmaLinux can now include comments in their patches for greater transparency. Users will see where the patch comes from, which was not an option before." Vasquez tells the magazine, "I think folks will be seriously happy about what they find as we release the new versions, namely, the consistency, stability, and security that they've come to expect from us."

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Reactions Continue to Viral Video that Led to Calls for College Presidents to Resign

Sat, 09/12/2023 - 8:34pm
After billionaire Bill Ackman demanded three college presidents "resign in disgrace," that post on X — excerpting their testimony before a U.S. Congressional committee — has now been viewed more than 104 million times, provoking a variety of reactions. Saturday afternoon, one of the three college presidents resigned — University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill. Politico reports that the Republican-led Committee now "will be investigating Harvard University, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania after their institutions' leaders failed to sufficiently condemn student protests calling for 'Jewish genocide.'" The BBC reports a wealthy UPenn donor reportedly withdrew a stock grant worth $100 million. But after watching the entire Congressional hearing, New York Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote that she'd seen a "more understandable" context: In the questioning before the now-infamous exchange, you can see the trap [Congresswoman Elise] Stefanik laid. "You understand that the use of the term 'intifada' in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict is indeed a call for violent armed resistance against the state of Israel, including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews. Are you aware of that?" she asked Claudine Gay of Harvard. Gay responded that such language was "abhorrent." Stefanik then badgered her to admit that students chanting about intifada were calling for genocide, and asked angrily whether that was against Harvard's code of conduct. "Will admissions offers be rescinded or any disciplinary action be taken against students or applicants who say, 'From the river to the sea' or 'intifada,' advocating for the murder of Jews?" Gay repeated that such "hateful, reckless, offensive speech is personally abhorrent to me," but said action would be taken only "when speech crosses into conduct." So later in the hearing, when Stefanik again started questioning Gay, Kornbluth and Magill about whether it was permissible for students to call for the genocide of the Jews, she was referring, it seemed clear, to common pro-Palestinian rhetoric and trying to get the university presidents to commit to disciplining those who use it. Doing so would be an egregious violation of free speech. After all, even if you're disgusted by slogans like "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," their meaning is contested... Liberal blogger Josh Marshall argues that "While groups like Hamas certainly use the word [intifada] with a strong eliminationist meaning it is simply not the case that the term consistently or usually or mostly refers to genocide. It's just not. Stefanik's basic equation was and is simply false and the university presidents were maladroit enough to fall into her trap." The Wall Street Journal published an investigation the day after the hearing. A political science professor at the University of California, Berkeley hired a survey firm to poll 250 students across the U.S. from "a variety of backgrounds" — and the results were surprising: A Latino engineering student from a southern university reported "definitely" supporting "from the river to the sea" because "Palestinians and Israelis should live in two separate countries, side by side." Shown on a map of the region that a Palestinian state would stretch from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, leaving no room for Israel, he downgraded his enthusiasm for the mantra to "probably not." Of the 80 students who saw the map, 75% similarly changed their view... In all, after learning a handful of basic facts about the Middle East, 67.8% of students went from supporting "from the river to the sea" to rejecting the mantra. These students had never seen a map of the Mideast and knew little about the region's geography, history, or demography. More about the phrase from the Associated Press: Many Palestinian activists say it's a call for peace and equality after 75 years of Israeli statehood and decades-long, open-ended Israeli military rule over millions of Palestinians. Jews hear a clear demand for Israel's destruction... By 2012, it was clear that Hamas had claimed the slogan in its drive to claim land spanning Israel, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank... The phrase also has roots in the Hamas charter... [Since 1997 the U.S. government has considered Hamas a terrorist organization.] "A Palestine between the river to the sea leaves not a single inch for Israel," read an open letter signed by 30 Jewish news outlets around the world and released on Wednesday... Last month, Vienna police banned a pro-Palestinian demonstration, citing the fact that the phrase "from the river to the sea" was mentioned in invitations and characterizing it as a call to violence. And in Britain, the Labour party issued a temporary punishment to a member of Parliament, Andy McDonald, for using the phrase during a rally at which he called for a stop to bombardment. As the controversy rages on, Ackman's X timeline now includes an official response reposted from a college that wasn't called to testify — Stanford University: In the context of the national discourse, Stanford unequivocally condemns calls for the genocide of Jews or any peoples. That statement would clearly violate Stanford's Fundamental Standard, the code of conduct for all students at the university. Ackman also retweeted this response from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: for a long time i said that antisemitism, particularly on the american left, was not as bad as people claimed. i'd like to just state that i was totally wrong. i still don't understand it, really. or know what to do about it. but it is so fucked. Wednesday UPenn's president announced they'd immediately consider a new change in policy," in an X post viewed 38.7 million times: For decades under multiple Penn presidents and consistent with most universities, Penn's policies have been guided by the [U.S.] Constitution and the law. In today's world, where we are seeing signs of hate proliferating across our campus and our world in a way not seen in years, these policies need to be clarified and evaluated. Penn must initiate a serious and careful look at our policies, and provost Jackson and I will immediately convene a process to do so. As president, I'm committed to a safe, secure, and supportive environment so all members of our community can thrive. We can and we will get this right. Thank you. The next day the university's business school called on Magill to resign. And Saturday afternoon, Magill resigned.

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Linus Torvalds Discusses Maintainers, AI, and Rust in the Kernel

Sat, 09/12/2023 - 7:34pm
ZDNet reports that "At the Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit Japan, Linus Torvalds and his good friend Dirk Hohndel, the head of Verizon open source, talked about the current state of Linux: Speaking of maintainers, Hohndel brought up the question of "maintainer fatigue and how draining and stressful this role is...." Torvalds replied, "It's much easier to find developers; we have a lot of developers. Some people think that you have to be a superdeveloper who can do everything to be a maintainer, but that's not actually true...." Hohndel commented that the aging of the kernel community is a "double-edged sword." Torvalds agreed, but he noted that "one of the things I liked about the Rust side of the kernel, was that there was one maintainer who was clearly much younger than most of the maintainers. We can clearly see that certain areas in the kernel bring in more young people...." Hohndel and Torvalds also talked about the use of the Rust language in the Linux kernel. Torvalds said, "It's been growing, but we don't have any part of the kernel that really depends on Rust yet. To me, Rust was one of those things that made technical sense, but to me personally, even more important was that we need to not stagnate as a kernel and as developers." That said, Torvalds continued, "Rust has not really shown itself as the next great big thing. But I think during next year, we'll actually be starting to integrate drivers and some even major subsystems that are starting to use it actively. So it's one of those things that is going to take years before it's a big part of the kernel. But it's certainly shaping up to be one of those." Torvalds also said he enjoyed the fact that open source "has become the standard within the industry." But later Hohndel, calling AI "autocorrect on steroids," asked Torvalds if he thought he'd ever see submissions of LLM-written code. "I'm convinced it's gonna happen. And it may well be happening already, maybe on a smaller scale where people use it more to help write code." But, unlike many people, Torvalds isn't too worried about AI. "It's clearly something where automation has always helped people write code. This is not anything new at all...." But, "What about hallucinations?," asked Hohndel. Torvalds, who will never stop being a little snarky, said, "I see the bugs that happen without AI every day. So that's why I'm not so worried. I think we're doing just fine at making mistakes on our own."

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Google Weighs Gemini AI Project To Tell People Their Life Story Using Their Photos and Searches

Sat, 09/12/2023 - 6:34pm
The Gemini LLMs developed by Google Deepmind can process more than text, including images, video and audio. So a team at Google has proposed using AI to create a "bird's-eye" view of users' lives, reports CNBC, "using mobile phone data such as photographs and searches." Dubbed "Project Ellmann," after biographer and literary critic Richard David Ellmann, the idea would be to use LLMs like Gemini to ingest search results, spot patterns in a user's photos, create a chatbot and "answer previously impossible questions," according to a copy of a presentation viewed by CNBC. Ellmann's aim, it states, is to be "Your Life Story Teller." It's unclear if the company has plans to produce these capabilities within Google Photos, or any other product. Google Photos has more than 1 billion users and 4 trillion photos and videos, according to a company blog post... A product manager for Google Photos presented Project Ellman alongside Gemini teams at a recent internal summit, according to documents viewed by CNBC. They wrote that the teams spent the past few months determining that large language models are the ideal tech to make this bird's-eye approach to one's life story a reality. Ellmann could pull in context using biographies, previous moments and subsequent photos to describe a user's photos more deeply than "just pixels with labels and metadata," the presentation states... "We trawl through your photos, looking at their tags and locations to identify a meaningful moment," a presentation slide reads. "When we step back and understand your life in its entirety, your overarching story becomes clear...." The team also demonstrated "Ellmann Chat," with the description: "Imagine opening ChatGPT but it already knows everything about your life. What would you ask it?" Reached for a comment, a Google spokesperson told CNBC that Google Photos "has always used AI to help people search their photos and videos, and we're excited about the potential of LLMs to unlock even more helpful experiences. "This was an early internal exploration and, as always, should we decide to roll out new features, we would take the time needed to ensure they were helpful to people, and designed to protect users' privacy and safety as our top priority."

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US Postal Service Warns Rural Mail Carriers: Don't Publicly Blame Delays on Amazon

Sat, 09/12/2023 - 5:34pm
15,279 people live in the rural Minnesota town of Bemidji. But now mail carriers there, "overwhelmed by Amazon packages, say they've been warned not to use the word 'Amazon,' including when customers ask why the mail is delayed," reports the Washington Post: "We are not to mention the word 'Amazon' to anyone," said a mail carrier who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their job. "If asked, they're to be referred to as 'Delivery Partners' or 'Distributors,'" said a second carrier. "It's ridiculous." The directive, passed down Monday morning from U.S. Postal Service management, comes three weeks after mail carriers in the northern Minnesota town staged a symbolic strike outside the post office, protesting the heavy workloads and long hours caused by the sudden arrival of thousands of Amazon packages... In addition to being banned from saying "Amazon," postal workers have also been told their jobs could be at risk if they speak publicly about post office issues. Staffers were told they could attend Tuesday's meeting only on their 30-minute lunch break if they changed out of uniform, mail carriers said. One mail carrier said he'd been warned there could be "consequences" for those who showed up. Postal customers in Bemidji have been complaining about late and missing mail since the beginning of November, when the contract for delivering Amazon packages in town switched from UPS to the post office. Mail carriers told The Post last month that they were instructed to deliver packages before the mail, leaving residents waiting for tax rebates, credit card statements, medical documents and checks... The post office has held a contract to deliver Amazon packages on Sundays since 2013. The agency, which has lost $6.5 billion in the past year, has said that it's crucial to increase package volume by cutting deals with Amazon and other retailers. Tuesday the town's mayor held a listening session for the state's two senators with Bemidji residents, whose complaints included "missing medications and late bills resulting in fees." Senator Amy Klobuchar later told the Post that "We need a very clear commitment that we're not going to be prioritizing Amazon packages over regular mail," promising to explore improving postal staffing and pay for rural carriers. On Monday, the Minnesota senators introduced a bill called the Postal Delivery Accountability Act, which would require the post office to improve tracking and reporting of delayed and undelivered mail nationally.

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Go Programmers Surveyed: Most Use Linux or MacOS

Sat, 09/12/2023 - 4:34pm
The Go team conducted a survey of Go Developers in August — and has just released the results. Among the findings: "90% of survey respondents saying they felt satisfied while working with Go during the prior year," while 6% said they were dissastified. Further, the number of people working with Go continues to increase; we see evidence of this from external research like Stack Overflow's Developer Survey (which found 14% of professional developers worked with Go during the past year, a roughly 15% year-over-year increase), as well as analytics for go.dev (which show an 8% rise in visitors year-over-year). Combining this growth with a high satisfaction score is evidence that Go continues to appeal to developers, and suggests that many developers who choose to learn the language feel good about their decision long afterwards... As in prior years, the majority of survey respondents told us they work with Go on Linux (63%) and macOS (58%) systems... We do continue to see that newer members of the Go community are more likely to be working with Windows than more experienced Go developers. We interpret this as a signal that Windows-based development is important for onboarding new developers to the Go ecosystem, and is a topic our team hopes to focus on more in 2024... While x86-compatible systems still account for the majority of development (89%), ARM64 is also now used by a majority of respondents (56%). This adoption appears to be partly driven by Apple Silicon; macOS developers are now more likely to say they develop for ARM64 than for x86-based architectures (76% vs. 71%). However, Apple hardware isn't the only factor driving ARM64 adoption: among respondents who don't develop on macOS at all, 29% still say they develop for ARM64. The most-preferred code editors among the surveyed Go programmers were VS Code (44%), GoLand (31%), Vim/Neovim (16%), and Emacs (3%). 52% of the survey's respondents actually selected "very satisfied" for their feelings about Go — the highest possible rating. Other interesting findings: " The top requests for improving toolchain warnings and errors were to make the messages more comprehensible and actionable; this sentiment was shared by developers of all experience levels, but was particularly strong among newer Go developers." "Three out of every four respondents work on Go software that also uses cloud services; this is evidence that developers see Go as a language for modern, cloud-based development." The experimental gonew tool (which offers predefined templates for instantiating new Go projects) "appears to solve critical problems for Go developers (especially developers new to Go) and does so in a way that matches their existing workflows for starting a new project. Based on these findings, we believe gonew can substantially reduce onboarding barriers for new Go developers and ease adoption of Go in organizations." And when it comes to AI, "Go developers said they are more interested in AI/ML tooling that improves the quality, reliability, and performance of code they write, rather than writing code for them."

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Before Sam Altman's Ouster, OpenAI's Leaders Were Warned of Abusive Behavior

Sat, 09/12/2023 - 3:34pm
"This fall, a small number of senior leaders approached the board of OpenAI with concerns about chief executive Sam Altman," the Washington Post reported late Friday: Altman — a revered mentor, and avatar of the AI revolution — had been psychologically abusive, the employees alleged, creating pockets of chaos and delays at the artificial-intelligence start-up, according to two people familiar with the board's thinking who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal matters. The company leaders, a group that included key figures and people who manage large teams, mentioned Altman's allegedly pitting employees against each other in unhealthy ways, the people said. Although the board members didn't use the language of abuse to describe Altman's behavior, these complaints echoed some of their interactions with Altman over the years, and they had already been debating the board's ability to hold the CEO accountable. Several board members thought Altman had lied to them, for example, as part of a campaign to remove board member Helen Toner after she published a paper criticizing OpenAI, the people said. The new complaints triggered a review of Altman's conduct during which the board weighed the devotion Altman had cultivated among factions of the company against the risk that OpenAI could lose key leaders who found interacting with him highly toxic. They also considered reports from several employees who said they feared retaliation from Altman: One told the board that Altman was hostile after the employee shared critical feedback with the CEO and that he undermined the employee on that person's team, the people said... The complaints about Altman's alleged behavior, which have not previously been reported, were a major factor in the board's abrupt decision to fire Altman on Nov. 17, according to the people. Initially cast as a clash over the safe development of artificial intelligence, Altman's firing was at least partially motivated by the sense that his behavior would make it impossible for the board to oversee the CEO. Bloomberg reported Friday: The board had heard from some senior executives at OpenAI who had issues with Altman, said one person familiar with directors' thinking. But employees approached board members warily because they were scared of potential repercussions of Altman finding out they had spoken out against him, the person said. Two other interesting details from the Post's article: While over 95% of the company's employees signed an open letter after Altman's firing demanding his return, "On social media, in news reports and on the anonymous app Blind, which requires members to sign up with a work email address to post, people identified as current OpenAI employees also described facing intense peer pressure to sign the mass-resignation letter." The Post also spotted "a cryptic post" on X Wednesday from OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever about lessons learned over the past month: "One such lesson is that the phrase 'the beatings will continue until morale improves' applies more often than it has any right to,'" (The Post adds that "The tweet was quickly deleted.") The Post also reported in November that "Before OpenAI, Altman was asked to leave by his mentor at the prominent start-up incubator Y Combinator, part of a pattern of clashes that some attribute to his self-serving approach."

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Jack Dorsey's Block Releases Bitkey Hardware Wallet

Sat, 09/12/2023 - 1:00pm
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Jack Dorsey's Block (the company formerly known as Square) announced today that it is releasing its hardware Bitcoin wallet, Bitkey, in 95 countries. However, users can only preorder the device at the moment, with shipping starting in early 2024. The device will cost $150 USD. Block's pitch to Bitcoin holders is that using a self-custodial crypto wallet is more secure than keeping their crypto assets in custodial wallets or exchanges. Self-custodial wallets put the onus on users to remember -- or store securely -- passwords or long seed phrases to unlock their accounts. The Proto team at Block, which worked on developing the Bitkey wallet, said that it solved this problem by using a two-of-three authentication mechanism. Two keys lie with the customer: the hardware wallet and a mobile app. Bitkey stores the third key on its server. The company argues that by having access to just one key, it can't access or move customers' Bitcoins. Block said that it uses its server-side key only to authenticate transactions to move Bitcoin when they just have their phone and to recover their account when their device or phone is lost. The company said the server-side key will also be able to handle the scenario when a customer loses both the phone and the hardware wallet. Recovery was recently detailed in a blog post by the company. [...] Block has partnered with crypto exchange Coinbase and the company's own Cash App to help people easily buy or transfer (or both) Bitcoins to the hardware wallet. The company said that the ability to transfer Bitcoin from Coinbase and Cash App will be rolled out immediately with other features coming later.

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Google's AI Note-Taking App Is Now Available

Sat, 09/12/2023 - 10:00am
NotebookLM, Google's experimental AI-powered note-taking app unveiled at Google I/O earlier this year (formerly referred to as Project Tailwind), is now widely available in the United States. "It's also getting several new features and is 'starting' to use Google's Gemini Pro AI model 'to help with document understanding and reasoning,'" reports The Verge. From the report: NotebookLM can already do things like summarize the documents you import into the app, come up with key points, and even answer questions about your note-taking sources. But now, Google is adding a way to transform your notes into other types of documents, too. Once you select all the notes you want to include, NotebookLM will automatically suggest formats, such as an outline or study guide. However, Google notes that you can also tell NotebookLM to transform your notes into a format of your choosing, like an email, script outline, newsletter, and more. Additionally, NotebookLM will now start providing suggested actions based on what you're doing in the app. As an example, Google says if you're writing a note, NotebookLM may automatically "offer tools to polish or refine your prose, or suggest related ideas from your sources based on what you've just written." Some other handy features coming to the app include a way to save helpful responses from NotebookLM as notes, share your notes with others, and focus NotebookLM's AI on select sources when chatting with it. Google is expanding some of NotebookLM's limitations as well. You can now include up to 20 sources in your notebook, each with up to 200,000 words.

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China Starts Up World's First Fourth-Generation Reactor, Readying Giant Nuclear Ship

Sat, 09/12/2023 - 7:00am
hackingbear writes: China has started commercial operations at a new generation nuclear reactor that is the first of its kind in the world, state media said on Dec 5. Compared with previous reactors, the fourth generation Shidaowan plant, a modular 200 megawatt (MW) high-temperature, gas-cooled reactor (HTGCR) plant developed jointly by state-run utility Huaneng, Tsinghua University and China National Nuclear Corporation, is designed to use fuel more efficiently and improve its economics, safety and environmental footprint as China turns to nuclear power to try to meet carbon emissions goals. In a related development, Shanghai-based Jiangnan Shipyard has unveiled a design for an innovative new giant container ship -- with a load capacity starting at 24,000 standard containers -- powered by a thorium molten-salt nuclear reactor, an alternative 4th gen design. "The new ship model uses nuclear energy as a clean energy source and adopts an internationally advanced fourth-generation molten salt reactor solution. The proposed design of super-large nuclear container ships will truly achieve 'zero emissions' during the operation cycle of this type of ship," the journal Marine Time China said in its official WeChat account. Shipbuilders from Japan, the United States, South Korea, and Europe have come up with similar designs but none of these countries has a modern and reliable operating reactor to make the design a reality. But China has carried on and, earlier this year, got the first thorium-based molten salt reactor, which needs little amount of water to cool down, making it safer and more efficient, up and running in the Gobi desert. Further reading: China is Building Nuclear Reactors Faster Than Any Other Country

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FDA Approves CRISPR-Based Medicine For Treatment of Sickle Cell Disease

Sat, 09/12/2023 - 3:30am
An anonymous reader quotes a report from STAT: The Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved the world's first medicine based on CRISPR gene-editing technology, a groundbreaking treatment for sickle cell disease that delivers a potential cure for people born with the chronic and life-shortening blood disorder. The new medicine, called Casgevy, is made by Vertex Pharmaceuticals and CRISPR Therapeutics. Its authorization is a scientific triumph for the technology that can efficiently and precisely repair DNA mutations -- ushering in a new era of genetic medicines for inherited diseases. In a clinical trial, Casgevy was shown to eliminate recurrent episodes of debilitating pain caused by sickle cell, which afflicts approximately 100,000 people in the U.S., a vast majority of whom are Black. The therapy, whose scientific name is exa-cel, is described as a potential cure because the genetic fix enabled by CRISPR is designed to last a lifetime, although confirmation will require years of follow-up. The FDA decision comes three weeks after regulators in the U.K. were the first to clear the drug. Approval in the European Union is expected next year. The FDA is also expected to rule on exa-cel as a treatment for beta thalassemia, another inherited blood disorder, by March 30. The FDA on Friday also approved another sickle cell treatment, a gene therapy from Bluebird Bio called Lyfgenia. Patients will now have the option of two cutting-edge therapies that provide potentially curative benefits. Scientists Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna published their first CRISPR paper just over a decade ago. In 2020, the research won the pair a Nobel Prize. Reflecting on the approval of Casgevy, Charpentier told STAT via email that she was "excited and pleased" for what it means for patients and their families.

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White House Threatens Patents of High-Priced Drugs

Sat, 09/12/2023 - 2:02am
The Biden administration is threatening to cancel the patents of some costly medications to allow rivals to make their own more affordable versions. The Associated Press reports: Under a plan announced Thursday, the government would consider overriding the patent for high-priced drugs that have been developed with the help of taxpayer money and letting competitors make them in hopes of driving down the cost. In a 15-second video released to YouTube on Wednesday night, President Joe Biden promised the move would lower prices. "Today, we're taking a very important step toward ending price gouging so you don't have to pay more for the medicine you need," he said. White House officials would not name drugs that might potentially be targeted. The government would consider seizing a patent if a drug is only available to a "narrow set of consumers," according to the proposal that will be open to public comment for 60 days. Drugmakers are almost certain to challenge the plan in court if it is enacted. [...] The White House also intends to focus more closely on private equity firms that purchase hospitals and health systems, then often whittle them down and sell quickly for a profit. The departments of Justice and Health and Human Services, and the Federal Trade Commission will work to share more data about health system ownership. While only a minority of drugs on the market relied so heavily on taxpayer dollars, the threat of a government "march-in" on patents will make many pharmaceutical companies think twice, said Jing Luo, a professor of medicine at University of Pittsburgh. "If I was a drug company that was trying to license a product that had benefited heavily from taxpayer money, I'd be very careful about how to price that product," Luo said. "I wouldn't want anyone to take my product away from me."

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Baldur's Gate 3 Wins Game of the Year

Sat, 09/12/2023 - 1:25am
The role-playing adventure game Baldur's Gate 3 won game of the year last night at The Game Awards 2023 in Los Angeles. The New York Times reports: It was the crowning achievement for a game based on Dungeons & Dragons that largely stayed under the radar during its six years in development by the Belgian company Larian Studios. But its summer release -- 23 years after its predecessor -- captivated gamers, who celebrated a robust character creator, deep narrative and branching paths that made it seem as though anything was possible in its fictional universe of vampires and elves. Baldur's Gate 3, which is available on the PC, the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X|S, also went home with several other awards, including those for best role-playing game, best performance and best multiplayer. The other nominees for game of the year were Alan Wake 2, by Remedy Entertainment; Marvel's Spider-Man 2, by Insomniac Games; Resident Evil 4, by Capcom; Super Mario Bros. Wonder, by Nintendo; and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, by Nintendo.

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Threads Adds Hashtags Ahead of EU Launch

Sat, 09/12/2023 - 1:00am
Ahead of its December 14th launch in the European Union, Meta's Twitter-like social media platform, Threads, is adding a simplified version of hashtags to help users find related posts. 9to5Google reports: Announced in a post on Threads today, Meta is adding "Tags" to the social platform as a way to categorize a post and have it show up alongside other posts on the same topic. Tags work similarly to hashtags in the sense that they group together content, but they also work differently. Unlike hashtags, you can only have one tag/topic on a post. So, where many platforms (including Instagram) suffer somewhat from posts being flooded with dozens of hashtags appended to the bottom, Threads seemingly avoids that entirely. Meta says that this "makes it easier for others who care about that topic to find and read your post." The other big difference with tags is how they appear in posts. Tags can be added by typing the # symbol in line with the text, but they don't appear with the symbol in the published post. Instead, they appear in blue text in the post, much like a traditional hyperlink. You can also add a tag by tapping the "#" symbol on the new post UI. As for the EU launch, Meta has opted to "sneakily update the Threads website with an untitled countdown timer (which won't be viewable in countries where Threads is already available) with just under six days remaining on the clock," reports The Verge. "European Instagram users can also search for the term 'ticket' within the app to discover a digital invitation to Threads, alongside a scannable QR code and a launch time -- which may vary depending on the country in which the user is based." "The delay in Threads' rollout to the EU has been caused by what Meta spokesperson Christine Pai described as 'upcoming regulatory uncertainty,' likely in reference to strict rules under the bloc's Digital Markets Act (DMA)."

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Europe Reaches a Deal On the World's First Comprehensive AI Rules

Sat, 09/12/2023 - 12:45am
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: European Union negotiators clinched a deal Friday on the world's first comprehensive artificial intelligence rules, paving the way for legal oversight of technology used in popular generative AI services like ChatGPT that has promised to transform everyday life and spurred warnings of existential dangers to humanity. Negotiators from the European Parliament and the bloc's 27 member countries overcame big differences on controversial points including generative AI and police use of facial recognition surveillance to sign a tentative political agreement for the Artificial Intelligence Act. "Deal!" tweeted European Commissioner Thierry Breton, just before midnight. "The EU becomes the very first continent to set clear rules for the use of AI." The result came after marathon closed-door talks this week, with one session lasting 22 hours before a second round kicked off Friday morning. Officials provided scant details on what exactly will make it into the eventual law, which wouldn't take effect until 2025 at the earliest. They were under the gun to secure a political victory for the flagship legislation but were expected to leave the door open to further talks to work out the fine print, likely to bring more backroom lobbying. The AI Act was originally designed to mitigate the dangers from specific AI functions based on their level of risk, from low to unacceptable. But lawmakers pushed to expand it to foundation models, the advanced systems that underpin general purpose AI services like ChatGPT and Google's Bard chatbot. Foundation models looked set to be one of the biggest sticking points for Europe. However, negotiators managed to reach a tentative compromise early in the talks, despite opposition led by France, which called instead for self-regulation to help homegrown European generative AI companies competing with big U.S rivals including OpenAI's backer Microsoft. [...] Under the deal, the most advanced foundation models that pose the biggest "systemic risks" will get extra scrutiny, including requirements to disclose more information such as how much computing power was used to train the systems.

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Verizon Gave Phone Data To Armed Stalker Who Posed As Cop Over Email

Sat, 09/12/2023 - 12:02am
Slash_Account_Dot writes: The FBI investigated a man who allegedly posed as a police officer in emails and phone calls to trick Verizon to hand over phone data belonging to a specific person that the suspect met on the dating section of porn site xHamster, according to a newly unsealed court record. Despite the relatively unconvincing cover story concocted by the suspect, including the use of a clearly non-government ProtonMail email address, Verizon handed over the victim's data to the alleged stalker, including their address and phone logs. The stalker then went on to threaten the victim and ended up driving to where he believed the victim lived while armed with a knife, according to the record. The news is a massive failure by Verizon who did not verify that the data request was fraudulent, and the company potentially put someone's safety at risk. The news also highlights the now common use of fraudulent emergency data requests (EDRs) or search warrants in the digital underworld, where criminals pretend to be law enforcement officers, fabricate an urgent scenario such as a kidnapping, and then convince telecoms or tech companies to hand over data that should only be accessible through legitimate law enforcement requests. As 404 Media previously reported, some hackers are using compromised government email accounts for this purpose.

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Chromebooks Are Problematic For Profits and Planet, Says Lenovo Exec

Fri, 08/12/2023 - 11:20pm
Laura Dobberstein reports via The Register: Lenovo won't stop making Chromebooks despite the machines scoring poorly when it comes to both sustainability and revenue, according to an exec speaking at Canalys APAC Forum in Bangkok on Wednesday. "I don't know who makes the profit," commented Che Min Tu, Lenovo senior vice president and group operations officer. "Everybody struggled to sell the Chromebook." Tu further remarked that the laptop is not great from an environmental standpoint either -- recycling its material won't be easy, or cheap. "But I think we'll continue to sell the Chromebook because there's a demand," explained Tu, who added that the major driver of that demand is coming from the education sector. [...] While the number of Chromebooks being sold has dropped since the pandemic, the education market has kept it afloat. In the US, education accounted for 80 percent of Chromebook sales in Q2 this year. IDC estimated that Q2 Chromebook channel sales shrank 1.8 percent to 5.8 million units in that quarter as many customers had refreshed in the previous quarter to avoid a licensing increase in the second half of 2023.

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Scientists Have Reported a Breakthrough In Understanding Whale Language

Fri, 08/12/2023 - 10:40pm
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Researchers have identified previously unknown elements of whale vocalizations that may be analogous to human speech, a new study reports. Sperm whales are giants of the deep, with healthy adults having no known predators. Scientists studying their vocalizations have already picked out key elements of their communication, namely clicks, sequences of which are called codas. Now, researchers led by Gasper Beus from the University of California, Berkeley report the discovery that the acoustic properties of these clicks -- for example, pitch -- are "on many levels analogous to human vowels and dipthongs," which is when one vowel sound morphs into another such as in the word "coin." The researchers even identify two unique "coda vowels" that are "actively exchanged" in conversation between whales, which they term the a-vowel and i-vowel. The researchers explain in their paper, published as a preprint online this week, that the first clue that so-called spectral properties could be meaningful for whale speech was provided by AI. Beus previously developed a deep learning model for human language called fiwGAN which "was trained to imitate sperm whale codas and embed information into these vocalizations." Not only did the AI predict elements of whale vocalizations already thought to be meaningful, such as clicks, but it also singled out acoustic properties. To follow up on the AI's tip, the researchers analyzed a dataset of 3948 sperm whale codas recorded with hydrophones placed directly on whales between 2014 and 2018. They only analyzed one channel from the hydrophones to control for underwater effects and whale movement, and removed click timing from their visualization to better isolate patterns in the acoustic properties themselves. These visualizations vindicated the AI's prediction: The whales reliably exchanged codas with one or two formants -- frequency peaks in the sound wave -- below the 10kHz range. The researchers termed these codas "vowels," with single-formant codas being a-vowels and two-formant codas being i-vowels. "This is by analogy to human vowels which differ in their formant frequencies," the authors wrote. They also identified upward and downward frequency "trajectories" in these codas, which they considered analogous to dipthongs in human language. Considering that these coda vowel patterns were very distinct and not intermixed, plus the existence of dipthongs, the researchers argue that whales are controlling the frequency of their vocalizations.

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Amazon Says Thieves Swiped Millions by Faking Product Refunds

Fri, 08/12/2023 - 10:00pm
Amazon sued what it called an international ring of thieves who swiped millions of dollars in merchandise from the company through a series of refund scams that included buying products on Amazon and seeking refunds without returning the goods. From a report: An organization called REKK advertised its refund services on social media sites, including Reddit and Discord, and communicated with perpetrators on the messaging app Telegram, Amazon said in a lawsuit filed Thursday in US District Court in the state of Washington. The lawsuit names REKK and nearly 30 people from the US, Canada, UK, Greece, Lithuania and the Netherlands as defendants in the scheme, which involved hacking into Amazon's internal systems and bribing Amazon employees to approve reimbursements. REKK charged customers, who wanted to get pricey items like MacBook Pro laptops and car tires without paying for them, a commission based on the value of the purchase. "The defendants' scheme tricks Amazon into processing refunds for products that are never returned; instead of returning the products as promised, defendants keep the product and the refund," Amazon said in its lawsuit.

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'Unprecedented Mass Coral Bleaching' Expected in 2024, Says Expert

Fri, 08/12/2023 - 9:20pm
Record-breaking land and sea temperatures, driven by climate breakdown, will probably cause "unprecedented mass coral bleaching and mortality" throughout 2024, according to a pioneering coral scientist. From a report: The impact of climate change on coral reefs has reached "uncharted territory," said Prof Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, from the University of Queensland, Australia, leading to concerns that we could be at a "tipping point." The upper ocean is undergoing unmatched changes in conditions, ecosystems and communities that can be traced back to the 1980s, when mass coral bleaching first appeared. In a paper published in the journal Science, US and Australian researchers say that historical data on sea surface temperatures, over four decades, suggests that this year's extreme marine heatwaves may be a precursor to a mass bleaching and coral mortality event across the Indo-Pacific in 2024-25. Mass coral bleaching happens when delicate corals become stressed due to factors including heat, causing them to lose their brown microbial algae, turning them white. At low stress levels, the algae can return to corals over a few months. But many Caribbean reef areas have recently experienced historically high sea temperatures that began one or two months earlier and lasted longer than usual. Crucially, 2023 is the first year of a potential pair of El Nino years, with the warmest average global surface sea temperature from February to July on record. Since 1997, every instance of these El Nino pairs has led to a global mass coral bleaching event.

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